There are two parts of food habits that we find people always have a lot of interest in: regional differences, and meat-eating. We’ve decided to put the two together here to give you an idea how meat preferences change by state. All the visualisation for this post has been done by Vivekanandan M.

The NSSO uses a recall period of seven days for meat as against 30 days for milk and 365 days for items like wheat and rice. What this means is that the respondent is asked whether he or she consumed a particular meat in the last even days, what quantity of it, and at what price. So it’s conceivable that meat consumption is underestimated by the NSSO. I haven’t eaten meat in the last week, for example, but I probably will this weekend.

The Hindu-CNN IBN State of The Nation survey conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in 2006 had found that 60% of Indians are non-vegetarians, and it is only among upper castes – Brahmins in particular – that vegetarianism dominates.

That disclaimer out of the way, the proportion of Indians who’d eaten meat in the week preceding the survey was quite low; just 26.5% of households in rural India and 21% in urban India reported consuming fish in the preceding week, and fish is India’s favourite meat (I use the term meat loosely to mean all “animal protein”). Chicken comes a close second, and mutton and beef a distant third and fourth.

So how do things pan out across the country? The data here is for monthly per capita consumption - the amount consumed by a person in a month.